Baby Showers

18 06 2008

I’ve gone pretty much my entire life thinking that baby showers were events for women only. This all changed when, for some reason, a buddy of mine whose wife is gonna drop a little Viet/Cambodian poop maker decided to invite me, Chicken Jon, Mandrew, and another friend (Landmine) to their baby shower last Sunday.

If you haven’t been to a baby shower, then let me say that it is without a doubt one of the most depressing events you will ever attend. If you are a man, there’s a good chance you’re not going to make it out alive if you aren’t extremely careful. So what I’m going to do now is provide a Man’s Guide to Surviving a Baby Shower for all the unfortunate penis-wielding souls out there who may find themselves at one of these things.

Step 1 - The Planner: The first thing you do is enter the house where you are greeted by the overzealous friend of the mom-to-be who planned this thing (usually against the mom’s will). You’ll recognize this woman by the crazed look in her eye, the fact that she’s holding a clipboard for some reason, and her constant yelling of shit like “OK PEOPLE, TIME FOR [insert inane game here]!!!!”

Figure 1: Avoid this woman, even if it kills you

You’ll see most people communicating with her by sighing, grunting, or rolling their eyes. When you first encounter her, it’s best to have your point man jump on the grenade and occupy her with a hug or loud small talk so the rest of your party can move past her into the center of the house.

Step 2 - The Party Room: If you live to get past the planner, you’ll immediately notice that you are surrounded on all sides by a ridiculous amount of femininity. There is pastel shit EVERYWHERE. Everything around you - cups, plates, plastic silverware, serving dishes, party favors, the cake, and possibly even the father-to-be are decorated in pale pinks, lilacs, and greens with pictures of teddy bears and balloons and other shit. The best place for you to be at this time is near the freezer, because you’ll notice after about five minutes that your testicles are beginning to melt and you will need to put them on ice.

Figure 2: Brace yourselves, gentlemen…

Your friend, the father to be, also notices his balls are beginning to melt. But don’t give him any ice, because he deserves melty balls for inviting you to this thing in the first place - and his melty balls may keep him from having more kids and inviting you to another one of these things.

Step 3 - Women: Do not, under any circumstances, hit on any of the women at a baby shower. This won’t be a problem in you’re at an asian baby shower like I was, because all asian women look like they’re 12 years old and they hate black people anyway. Otherwise, be advised that women at baby showers are in a very delicate emotional state much like they will be at their own weddings. They’re sitting around watching their pregnant friend get showered with attention and gifts - and as they sit there watching it, they slowly start to want it for themselves, even if it means having their own fucking baby. So when you go up to them and start chatting them up, you may find them inexplicably enthusiastic about taking you home and fucking your brains out. If you’re dumb enough to go home with them, make sure you know where your condoms are at all times lest the woman poke holes in them.

Figure 3: I recommend wearing one of these to any baby shower or wedding

Step 4 - Games: One of the worst parts of the baby shower is the series of idiotic games that the planner (see step 1) forces everyone to play. All of these games will be exceptionally lame, but you will almost certainly be required to participate in one. The best thing to do is to avoid the planner until she comes near the end of the list of games because that’s usually when she starts listing the ones that involve alcohol. Mandrew, Chicken Jon, and I wound up playing a game where everyone’s given a baby bottle filled with beer and the winner is the first person to drink it all*.

Figure 4: How come this asshole gets a real bottle?

I won this game (at the cost of my immortal soul) and received a candle as a prize. I asked Mandrew and Landmine to kill me, but they let me live just to spite me.

Step 5 - Gifts: This is unquestionably the worst part of the whole affair. Everyone gets in a big gay circle and watches the mother and father open a parade of increasingly depressing gifts for sixty fucking minutes. Though this is the worst part of the event, you’ll actually find it fairly easy to entertain yourself:

  • Everytime a new gift is opened, gasp loudly in unison with your friends. When your buddy recognizes what the gift is, yell “dammit this sucks!” He will appreciate you vocalizing his internal monologue
  • As your buddy unwraps each gift, say “c’moooooooooooon new set of balls!”
  • Sneak offensive gag gifts into the pile. You can choose any end of the offensive spectrum, from the mildly offensive and fairly funny (e.g. a box of condoms) to the insanely offensive and downright hurtful (an appointment at a local abortion clinic)

You’re free to leave the baby shower once all the gifts have been opened, because that’s really all you were invited for anyway. Be sure to punch your buddy in the testicles on your way out just to let him know how you feel.

* Drinking out of a baby bottle is probably the most insanely difficult thing I’ve ever done


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Feminism

29 05 2008

I imagine that my rather large female reader base is going to read the first three or sentences of this article, get incredibly angry, stop reading, and start sending me a bunch of angry emails that I will, to return the favor, also not read. But I’m doing it anyway. Fuck it.

My Conoy background has given me a perspective on gender issues that usually enrages traditional western feminists despite it being one that I believe would give women far more power than the standard notion of ‘gender equality’.

Figure 1: Typical feminist, five seconds after I’ve started talking

In the old days before white people came and fucked everything up, only Conoy men served as Werowance and Tayac*. Only men were the soldiers and the builders. Only men could serve on the governing councils. Women were sent away from the villages during their Moon** because of the cosmic power it represented (kind of a “we’re not worthy” thing). In the household, a man’s word was final.

On the flip side, women didn’t have the same TYPE of power as men - but they had power that was arguably equal to or even greater than that of men. Clan Mothers could have a Werowance executed as long as she could prove he was fucking up (if the U.S. was Conoy-run, Nancy Pelosi could’ve had George Bush killed years ago). Women were responsible not just for cooking, but for the land itself. It was the women (and children) that handled the entire planting cycle from seed to harvest and, though there was no concept of land ownership, land was considered to ‘belong’ to women. Inheritance was matrilineal. When a man and woman married, the man and the children became part of the woman’s clan and moved into the woman’s lodge, rather than the other way around. If a woman wanted a divorce, she grabbed up all her husband’s shit and tossed it out of the lodge…and this constituted a formal divorce.

Figure 2: Intimidating, yes. But a woman owns his nuts, I promise.

Unfortunately, this Indian brand of assigning gender roles would never work in the modern world because, at its core, it’s a system of checks and balances between men and women with roles assigned according to natural predispositions (men are naturally aggressive and outwardly dominant, women are naturally nurturing and inwardly dominant). Men had power over the world, but women had power over the men. Hyperindustrialized economies, unfortunately, render this system moot because gender is no longer a parameter in the socio-economic equation (except when it comes to prejudice).

In my view, western feminism has done a disservice to women because it’s actually eroded their real power over men. This is because western feminism is essentially based on the idea of turning women socially and economically into men***. The result of this has been very empowering for women (or so it would seem), but it’s come at the cost of removing co-dependence between men and women which, from a macro-societal standpoint, is a bad thing. Women don’t ‘need’ men anymore, per se - but now the men don’t ‘need’ women either. With men and women adopting the same socio-economic roles, the need (and power) that men and women have for (and over) one another has been degraded to a purely sexual one.

This is why chivalry is dead. This is why we always have to listen to stupid ass men accusing empowered women of “penis envy” and why we always have to listen to stupid ass women asserting their power over men with the “we have the vagina, and we know you want it” argument.

Figure 3: The current state of Chivalry…

Of course, I could direct my anger at industrialized economies rather than feminism, but I choose to attack feminism because its founders chose the first (and lower) of the two roads the ideology could have adopted:

  1. Empower women by adopting the boorish and aggressive qualities of men
  2. Empower women by making men adopt the more reserved and genteel (but not feminine) qualities of women

Both options are fairly unnatural, but I get the feeling that if feminists had pursued option 2, both girls and guys would be a whole lot happier. The ladies could’ve made it happen, too. After all, they have the vagina and yes, we do want it.

Instead they chose option 1, and how very sad it is to see that choice reduce men and women to mere baby makers in the eyes of one another.

*Werowance = Chief. Tayac = Chief of Chiefs
**Menstrual cycle
***I am not a feminist scholar, and am not well versed in what feminism is theoretically based on. I don’t give a shit about theory - I’m basing this claim instead on what I’ve seen and heard from actual feminists in day-to-day life


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Children II

21 04 2008

Part of an ongoing series. See the original Children article here.

I’ve recently started taking public transportation to work. This, combined with my early-in/early-out schedule (I arrive at 7am and leave around 3pm - right when school lets out) means one thing and one thing only: I have to deal with a bunch of goddamn motherfucking kids getting on my subway trains.

Figure 1: The children are the future. The apocalypse is in the future. It all makes sense.

In an earlier post, I claimed that nothing was more indicative of the plight of black people than the ‘black’ grocery store. I was wrong. The single biggest indicator of the plight of black America is the behavior of our children.

My daily Metro ride from White Flint station to Woodley Park is usually the most peaceful 15 minutes or so of my day. There’s practically no one on the train. No one has their mp3 player turned all the way up so I can hear exactly what songs they’re listening to with earbud headphones all the way on the other side of the fucking train. There are no whinos in the car either. I can sit in the elder-handicapped reserved seats and stretch out my freakishly long legs as I read a book or whip out my laptop to work on websites. Then we hit Woodley Park, and all fucking hell breaks loose.

Figure 2: Tactical Map of My Misery

At Woodley Park, 20 motherfucking kids leap into the train, knocking over old people and stepping on peoples’ shoes without even thinking to turn around and offer an ‘excuse me’ or ‘I’m sorry’. They fill up all the seats as quickly as possible, leaving the adults (especially the old people) who are legitimately tired to stand up the entire time. But the worst part of all…

They are all SCREAMING at each other.

It doesn’t matter whether they’re sitting right next to each other, or at opposite ends of the car. They scream at the top of their lungs. They are swearing profusely in front of adults, and not only do they not care - they seem to be proud of it. Ten year old boys are watching grown women walk by and saying shit like “yea she sexy as shit. I’d FUCK”, and they’re making sure the woman hears it. These demonic embryos are trying to mimic or assert adulthood by embracing the worst parts of being grown up.

At each stop, more and more of these little fuck-cunts jump onto my train. A feeding-frenzy of swearing, screaming, running, jumping, and property damage ensues that makes me feel I’ve been transported onto a pirate ship commanded by grog-filled midgets with plastic barettes in their hair.

Figure 3: …you get the idea

As I sit there with all five of my senses being assaulted by the little pro-choice justifications cutting up all around me, I can’t help but realize that one day these children will grow up, and there will be no hope for them. They will have no idea how to function in the real world. They will be listless followers of MTV and BET. They will watch Tyler Perry movies and actually enjoy them. They will be sociopathic and not even know it. They will be utterly unemployable. They will never take the Hippocratic Oath or pass the bar. They will be the reason Democrats raise taxes on me again.

The little shitholes finally make their exit at L’Enfant Plaza, leaving me with just enough time to regain my sanity before my exit stop at Federal Center SW. I walk four blocks to my condo, all the while avoiding the urge to play in traffic. I get home and pop ‘Idiocracy‘ into my DVD player for the 10th time. I realize that I’m not seeing comedy; I’m seeing into the fucking future.

Maybe the Mayans were right, and we’ll get lucky and have the world end on December 21, 2012.


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Children

24 03 2008

Thankfully, I have yet to actually see a scenario that standup comedians often describe: a child (usually a white one) telling his or her parents to go fuck themselves. What I’m seeing an alarming increase in, however, are children telling their parents what they will or will not do. For this, and many other reasons, children need to fucking die.

As time marches on, you can see the crumbling of American personal character on a macro scale pretty much everyday. Nobody believes there should be real consequences for breaking the rules (ask Florida and Michigan). Married couples are getting divorced at the first sign of trouble. Moral relativism is steeply on the rise. NIMBY applies to virtually everyone. People think that stupid ass ‘going green’ campaigns that really don’t inconvenience them in any way is going to head off global warming. MTV is allowed to exist.

All of this can be attributed to the fact that we don’t give our children enough discipline. By ‘discipline’, I don’t mean ‘beatings’ - I mean ‘persistent psychological trauma.’

cryingchild.jpg

Figure 1: Character Building

I don’t think you necessarily need to beat your kids to get them in line or to help them build character. You’ll see many proponents of ‘old-school’ parenting bragging about the frequency and severity of the beatings they received as a child, and how it shaped them into a functioning adult. While I’m not against laying the corporal smackdown on a small child, I do believe that its effectiveness is limited. Children eventually get used to beatings. Their pain tolerances increase. They learn to meditate the pain away like Shaolin Monks. Eventually, the beatings go from being a source of genuine fear to merely being a nuisance.

But you can use a beating to kickstart a lifelong program of emotional terror. Here’s an example from my life:

In all the years of my childhood, I was officially beaten* only one time. It happened when I was five or six years old as a result of me mouthing off to my mother in front of her friends. My ass was beaten until the slur ‘redskin’ could applied to me literally. I think I remember my mother laughing the whole time. The memory of my one and only beating is so seared into my memory that I can recall the pattern on the bed spread (yellow background with orange stenciled butterflies), the time of day (near high noon), and the fact that the curtains in the room were drawn shut.

It wasn’t until years later that I understood the reason my mother whooped my ass so severely: it was to make me fear my father for the rest of my life. My mother was a relatively small woman during my youth at 5′ 8″ and weighing about 115 lbs, with small wrists, thin fingers, thin neck, etc. My father, on the other hand, was a monster to me. As a boy I wasn’t really sure what God’s plan was for my dad, but with him towering at 6′ 2″ and weighing well over 200lbs, I was pretty sure it involved smashing things. So if my mother could kick my ass, then I could only imagine what would happen if my father was turned loose on me:

hulk.jpg

Figure 2: Actually, I could imagine exactly what would happen

From that point on, my parents kept me in line with a two-part disciplinary strategy. One part was a combination of verbal threats and groundings for minor offenses**. I never committed any major offenses** because of the second part of the strategy - an ever-increasing fear of my father. Over the years, my father would send me subtle hints about his power. He made me aware that there were guns in the house and he knew how to use them. He convinced me that he could look at my tongue to determine if I’d been playing with matches. He would often relate his hunting stories to me, so I knew he was capable of killing things bigger than people. He would ‘playfully’ pluck me in the back of the head (this hurt like fucking hell) with one finger…making me implicitly afraid of the pain he could inflict with an entire arm.

So you see, you don’t actually need to beat your children to keep them in line - you just have to constantly scare the living shit out of them. This is a good thing for two reasons: 1.) it removes the threat of children calling child services (kids can’t substantiate claims of terror if they can’t prove you’re beating them), and 2.) scaring children is fun.

Terror is the best medicine for raising children, which leads me to believe that Osama Bin Laden is (if he has kids) the greatest dad since Abraham:

abraham_and_son.jpg

Figure 3: Parenting techniques, as recommended by God Himself

*a beating is only ‘official’ if the parent interrupts what they are doing to beat you for the distinct and sole purpose of beating you. In other words, the beating is an event in and of itself with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This is different than, say, the casual swat a parent will give to calm a child that’s acting like an asshole in a grocery store.

**the difference between a major offense and a minoroffense involved whether or not what I did embarrassed my parents publicly


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